Andrew_Paterson

I really like the concept behind Ghostship Aftermath but the execution is so poor that it's impossible to play in any meaningful way. Keys can't be rebound, returning to the menu exits the current stage. Key controls gets stuck or can't be used. The view gets stuck at bizarre angles. Crouch doesn't work. This has been an issue from version 1.0 all the way to 1.5. Seriously. Crouching causes the player to slowly rise into the ceiling. The player gets stuck on everything. Boxes marked fragile, the edges of floor plates, narrow corridors, stuff on the ceiling. It's incredibly frustrating and only sometimes possible to unstick oneself. AI and aliens. The less said about this the better. The aliens are a bunch of poorly animated, marginally textured, mismatched models found who-know-where. And then they're controlled by AI that sticks them on everything I that the player gets stuck on. Except when they magically phase through things. Shooting them is damn near impossible as the gun reticule auto-levels when near level but not when looking up or down. Lots of aliens are low to the ground and the player can't aim that low. Most annoyingly the aliens don't seem to collide with the player and can run through you, hit you from behind before you can slowly turn and around and then they repeat it. Some aliens move faster than you but due to the random nature of the game can only be killed by unreachable guns; which makes for irritating unavoidable deaths. Ghostship Aftermath has huge potential but is so terribly produced that selling it as a finished product is a borderline scam.

I seldom give games low or high scores unless they are uttlery outstanding in some way. Dark Souls II is an outstandingly bad console port. I assume. I haven't managed to start it yet as it immediately crashes back to the desktop. Couple this with feedback that keyboard and mouse controls are broken and that modding the game to fix it is a bannable offence and there's not a lot left. A sincere pity that Dark Souls II is pile of trash because I really, really, really enjoyed the first one.

Ultionus is pretty and bright with decent music. It has that old keep dying to you learn vibe which is nice. The stages are short but varied and generally feel about the right length. The problem is the controls. They're unresponsive and sticky. In a game that's a button mashing retro shooter this is quite a big problem. If the weapons were more varied and the controls were fixed then this game would be stellar. As it is it's tending to mediocre.

I love games where I can just wander around and explore with no pressure to complete the Main Quest(tm) and no hand holding every step of the way,. So why have I given MirrorMoon such a low score? Because the controls are a broken mess. I don't mean the galaxy flight control screen either. I mean just trying to change options etc... don't work. MirrorMoon feels remarkably like a half-written hobbyist project that someone then decided to charge money for. Putting in standard twin-stick FPS controls wouldn't have hurt the feel of the game but it would have made it a lot more accessible. Not being able to configure controls really doesn't help either. Having the controller only work on the moons (but then be un-disableable (word)) is a pain. JoyToKey is your friend. Give it a couple of patches (which haven't happened) and this game could be enjoyable. Or at least an experience.

Fallout 3 is - 6 years down the line - probably my favourite game. It's also one of the only two games |I've given a 10 to here on Metacrtic. It's not perfect (crashing is a way of life) but the open world game-play gives the option for creating your own story or just mucking about that no other sandbox game I've played has yet managed to capture.

Dungeon Hearts is - I imagine - a pretty good touch screen time waster. Unfortunately tablet controls haven't translated well to the mouse world and all that's left is a bland and frustrating colour matching game. I can't think of any reason - given that you're sitting in front of a PC - why you'd be playing Dungeon Hearts instead of something else.

So you got your basic Star Control 2. Then you open source the code and art - everything except the title. Call it The Ur-Quan Masters and get a group of dedicated individuals to make it awesomer than the original. Then get some more dedicated individuals to convert all the old VGA art into HD. Jobs done. And it's even more awersomer than awesome.

L.A. Noire sounds like it really should have been great. Unfortunately I can neither log into Rockstar's silly club nor start the game without that. Have a 1 for the concept.

Even after all the alleged patch fixes this game is still crashy and broken. Space Hulk's play is true to the board game which is good if that's what you're expecting (and I did) but controlling the terminators is just so tedious. Setting the animation speed up makes them look silly but setting it to normal makes them turn more slowly than an actual scale guy in power armour. The sound is nice but the graphics are.... poor. Even when set to fantastic it looks more like a fan tribute than a retail game. Save your money and play the original.

A game that almost perfectly sums up 'meh'. It does nothing really badly but neither does it do anything particularly well. My biggest gripe is that the terrain destruction mechanic, unlike the original Red Faction is a gimmick rather than a gameplay changer. Don't avoid this game but don't buy it unless you're bored or it's on sale.

There's a lot to like about Shadowrun Returns. Not the least of which it is a huge amount of fun. Fun marred by some silly but painful issues but still fun. What Shadowrun does right is the turn based game is simple but still tactical. The story moves fast and leaves me compelled to read all the text boxes. A little mediocre are the graphics and more so the sound effects. Not a big issue unless you're expecting something that looks like XCom: Enemy Unknown. What it does wrong is unfortunate and honestly feels like it could have been fixed with a couple of weeks more effort. This game only auto-saves. And those saves are few and far between (generally 15 to 20 minutes of game-play). This can be quite frustrating when a simple battles turns into a run of bad dice rolls and a character you didn't want dead ends of up dead. Or, more annoyingly, when you need to shut down and spend quarter of an hour hunting for the next save point (Why not save when closing the parties locker?) The next big issue (again a small programming issue) is that I run a higher than usual resolution but can only zoom as if I was running a much lower resolution leaving everything looking tiny including interactive icons. This is exacerbated by character dialogues that change the camera zoom. And there is a lot of dialogue. All in a all a pretty awesome game almost broken by two small issues. Oops.

Skullgirls is nothing revolutionary. It's a slightly annoying if otherwise polished fighting game. If you're looking for fluidly drawn fighting fighting breasts then Vanguard Princess is a better bet. If you're in it for the gameplay and enjoy fighters then you'll probably enjoy this but just don't expect anything special.

Eador: Masters of the Broken World is a 6 verging on a 7. The biggest issue (and it's a pretty big one) is that it's immensely tedious. Both because there are so many shards to capture with no significant difference in gameplay between each shard. And because whilst playing the strategic game the strategy is always the same. Bunker down whilst leveling your hero and building the minimum infrastructure and then rush out and hope you don't hit a random set-back. Do I recommended this? It's up to you. You'll already know if you like this style of game or not whilst it's no Age of Wonders it's not horrible either just tedious.

Adventure Park is certainly not the most polished of games possibly not even an entirely complete game but it is fun for a couple of hours. You'll find nothing here you haven't seen before, and that's almost not a problem as the cartoonish graphics are bright and colourful and suit the tone of the game. Cranking up the detail all the way isn't going to blow anyone's mind but it is pretty and shouldn't be cause for too much complaint. The sounds leaves a lot to be desired: I don't think I remember any sound effects, no ride noises, no laughing/screaming passengers and the music becomes repetitive. It feels more like it belongs in an arcade shooter than a theme park game. And then there's the game-play... There's really not a lot too it. This is why you'll probably not play for more than an hour or two. Place rides, engineers, gardeners and vending machines and tweak prices until you start making a profit. There's nothing inspired or exciting about it. You can't build an awesome roller coaster and gloat over the torment of your customers because the roller coasters seem to travel at a single set speed and don't cause much in the way of reaction. Adventure Park is a game about park management rather than park enjoyment.

I'd dearly love to comment on the gameplay. But I can't. It doesn't start. I don't even see a logo. Very briefly a process pops up but then disappears again. As there are no logs I can't even begin to start guessing what's going on. I've tried re-installing the supplied versions of DirectX and PhysX but with no joy. I've turned off all the defense/firewall/antivirus software I run but still no joy. As far as I can remember this is the most broken game I have every bought.. Avoid with extreme prejudice.

I think I may have been too lenient on Alien Breed: Impact, I gave it a 6/10. Alien Breed: Assault takes the flaws from impact and magnifies them. I seriously wonder if someone at Team17 was tasked with going through everything that made Impact frustrating, got confused and instead of making things less frustrating made them more frustrating instead. The map is still unusable but now has a wobbly effect added. The camera arguably the first games biggest flaw has been worsened. There are now sections of the game where it's fixed. Pointing the wrong way around and zoomed in. What were the designers thinking? At least the free rotational camera could be fought to some extent but no more. Then there are the in-game cut scenes. Impact didn't have many and for that you should be thankful. Assault has one every few minutes. They're unskippable and leave the camera pointed in a random (generally bad) direction. The aliens can still move whilst the cut-scene is playing so you get mobbed as soon as you regain control. I've also had one that's left me standing in fire while it played. The 'pew-pew' laser cannon my favourite gun has been removed. Impact gave out far to much ammo Assault gives out too little. This should have made them game more tactical but as the only viable approach to killing aliens is to shoot them I don't know. Grenades are practically useless as charging to throw one takes several times longer than it takes for an alien to run across the screen which means you either blow yourself up or the alien hurts you and interrupts the throw. There are more timed environment hazards which makes the running back and forth through the ship (yeah you still do that even more annoying. This around time you'll navigate narrow corridors that obscure whats happening in them and occasionally run under the floor. Alien Breed 2 takes the series from 'mediocre' to 'broken'.

Right off the bat Alien Breed: Impact feels like a game that's only half-finished. A month or two more could taken this game from being very mediocre to very good. The graphics are generally pretty and detailed in a grey and blue sort of way. The first three stages are extremely repetitive whilst the last two, the hydroponics level and the ghost ship do mix it up a bit. The sound is all over, there are really chilling alien noises mixed with the silly pew-pew of the laser gun. The voice acting is generally good but only in the cut-scenes. The point where Alien Breed really falls down is it's game-play. You'll probably find fighting the camera and map far more challenging than fighting the aliens. If the character was moved slightly further up the map and zoomed out a bit more a lot of problems would be solved. Redesigning the stages so a non-rotational camera could have been used would have been a huge plus. Shooting aliens at the bottom of the screen and trying to find items and doors hidden behind walls is... annoying. The map will show you your objective in the HUD but no ship layout. To see the ship layout you need to use your tablet but then the objective is only shown if it fits on the immediately visible piece of map. This isn't helped by the controls opening the map with one key and closing it with another. Did I mention annoying. Yeah am sure I did. The initial stages, despite having repetitive graphics will then also see you running from one end of the ship to the other making for even more repetitive play. This artificially lengthens the stages as the game designers contrive sillier and sillier reasons to need to run back through areas you've already been through. This wouldn't be so bad if you were constantly under attack but they are mostly long walks with nothing happening you can only run for a limited period of time. Things get somewhat better later on. The aliens start swarming from all corners making for a lot more action. The stages are still back-and-forth but at least there's stuff to do. And now I come to the aliens my next big gripe. There are about 4 or 5 types of alien but they're practically indistinguishable. I think they're all supposed to have special abilities and that would have been awesome if they used them and forced tactical play. But they don't, they run straight lines towards the player and as they don't collide with each other usually form an easy to shoot pile. There's little satisfaction in shooting them as they don't throw out gouts of green alien blood, only the odd particle. They get knocked around easily by even weak weapons and this before dying with barely a whimper and a quick death animation. This sounds really negative and it is until later on when for instance wading through dozens of aliens in Hydroponics is a complete blast. Then you don't notice the silly bullets, lack of blood or mind the quick deaths. Moving on: the last issue I have is with the story. The main character is the chief engineer of the space ship The Leopold. The Chief Engineer. But he has no security rights and no understanding of engineering consoles he breaks just about every one he touches. Using a generic space marine character would have made more sense. Like the Doom Guy. Also the Leopold has crashed into a giant derelict ship of unknown origin. Except the name of the ship is written on the side. In English. And it's an Intex ship just like the Leopold. Surely someone would have kept a record of it somewhere. I'm going to stop complaining now and recommended Alien Breed. It may not be great but it is worth a couple of your dollars and few of your hours. For all I've said I did enjoy it but suspect I should have cranked up the difficulty.

Just for once I'd like it if a developer would play test their game before releasing it. And whilst this might not be an entirely fair comment it certainly applies to Fallen Enchantress. Not counting game breaking bugs; the UI is clunky and obtuse; it also doesn't take your screen resolution into account so you'll be scrolling tiny text windows with 90% of the screen unused. You're either over-powered or under-powered there is no tension in the battles or even the maps really. You'll win or lose and know the outcome long before it happens. And the generic pipe music becomes really, really grating. I've had quest objects disappear, endless units swarm the map and been unable to see the main quest because it's hidden under some optional quest. It's all quite frustrating. Fallen Enchantress may actually be more broken than the venerable Master of Magic and it lacks any of the original's charm. It's not all negative but the problem is there are not outstanding positives. Certainly if you enjoy turn based fantasy games then give this a whirl but keep your expectations low.

Stronghold 3 is buggier than a big bug full of little bugs. Even disregarding the many graphical glitches, sound cut outs and AI that is stupid beyond belief there is still very little to recommend it. It looks extraordinarily dated more like a student project than a professional release. The story is forgettable and the campaign is slow. It advances at the same speed as your troops moving across the map; which is to say like molasses on slight grade. I have not played a previous Stonghold game so I don't know how this compares but the strategy and economics are pretty thoughtful and entertaining (between crashes back to the desktop). Get the combination and order of troops wrong when you assault another castle and you're going to suffer for it. Similarly if you don't tailor your economy to support your chosen troops you're going to lose. All in all this is a game that should have been a lot better than it is.

Papo & Yo is an interesting if not exceptional experience. And this is the crux of it; someone had a story to tell and an experience to relate. If you play this game as a game particularly if you expect a challenging puzzle game you're going to be disappointed. Whereas if you liked games like Dear Esther then Papo & Yo will probably be right up your alley. The graphics are functional but scarcely stress the Unreal Engine. The sound is a bit lackluster and the puzzles themselves are not logical (though neither are they difficult). Basically push a white glowy thing which will enable you to push another white glowy thing or lead the monster to a white glowy thing. You will not be taxed by this and if you find yourself stuck then it's probably because you haven't run to the right area yet. I don't really have a problem with this as it allows the story to flow without frustration. Papa & Yo is a pretty solid game; I've had only two technical issues: once it's locked up my PC entirely requiring a reboot and then I've gotten stuck in a wall on moving block. I'd rate it a pretty solid 65/100 but was tempted to give it a 0. A voter block looks to be artificially inflating the user scores; at the time of writing only 7 of the 17 user reviews really looked legitimate. Finally is it worth your money? Yes I think so. Not all game can or should be massive AAA titles. Papo & Yo has it's niche and it fills it.

Sometimes I wonder why I haven't learned to read meta critic user reviews BEFORE buying a game. Dark Souls is probably an awesome game provided you're not playing the shoddy PC port. But I'm getting ahead of myself and before I start ranting about how terrible the game-play is I must walk you through the issues in trying to get to game-play. Firstly there was the wait for the Steam key it took about a week to acquire which is long in the digital age but livable. Then I had endless issues with Windows Live. I have windows live installed and working for other games but for Dark Souls it crashed and/or battled to sign in. Sadly you need Windows Live to save. I sorted Windows Live out and finally got into the game. Or thought I had: I got bogged down in the awful, awful character creation interface and then got stuck watching a long unskippable cinematic followed immediately by another long unskippable cinematic. I finally get to play but have very little good will left after the preceding mess. And then I discover that the controls are broken. A keyboard and mouse are not recommend and can't be used anyway as the mouse sensitivity on it's lowest setting will see a tiny bump swing the character through ninety degrees. An XBox controller (which is recommended) doesn't work because the button configurations are mangled and can't be re-configured. A genuine XBox controller on a genuine windows operating system (Win 7) and somehow the Dark Souls developers got the button mappings wrong. This game is broken. I finally quit in frustration. Or tried to. Because the controls are mangled there was no way to get back to a menu to save and quit; I had kill the process instead. Now every time I launch the game it chastises me for not closing it correctly. After installing various fan patches I got the game to a playable (and decently looking) state and unfortunately discovered that after all the effort I'd gone through the game play is terrible. The premise is that Dark Souls is unforgiving and will kill you again and again until you play cautiously which is awesome. I've been looking for a challenging game for years. The reality is the game killed me again and again as the camera seldom points anywhere useful and I stepped off ledges I couldn't see. Or the character locks onto an enemy far behind him and stops me from blocking an enemy immediately in-front. A stabbed in the back instant kill. Absolutely nothing about Dark Souls is good or even working.

I found myself becoming bored with Borderlands 2 far to quickly. I've avoided it for ages (finally picked it up on a Steam sale) because I didn't like the artistic direction, funnily enough once I started playing it I then thought the graphics were awesome. The issue I had is that every fight is the same or at least similar enough that I lost the urge to see what's over the next hill. I'm not exactly sure where it went wrong because on the surface it should be very similar to Fallout 3; and I've probably spent more time in that wasteland than is healthy. The quests don't quite keep me entertained, exploring turns up obvious but samey stages, the enemies look different but fight very similarly. They fall on the wrong side of the line between challenge though smart AI and challenge though soaking up bullets. Lastly the sound and music lacks impact. Not a broken game by any means but not one I found entertaining.

From Dust is an enjoyable little romp through the lands of, well... through various lands. It's short but cheap and scratches a sandbox god game itch that I've had ever since Master of Magic. I bought and began playing it long after the DRM debacle had been resolved (although I still have a small gripe that I have to launch it through Uplay). I'm not going to penalise it for that. It's pretty enough and the campaign will have you scratching your head until you've mastered the breath abilities. Second time around there's little challenge but sculpting the stages into utopias for the tribe is fun. And that brings me to the games biggest problem. The tribe. Their path-finding and AI is awful. Particularly in the challenge maps. I'll see men stuck on the one spike in a flat landscape; stop just before they reach a goal and be flummoxed by a tiny puddle. Most annoyingly they will always try and take the shortest straight line which leads to lots of running back and forth as a passable path presents itself around an obstacle and then subsides causing them men to take the shortest path again and run slap into the obstacle. Fix the path and repeat. Adding way-points or the ability tell tribesmen to move to a spot would have fixed this but as it stands it seems unnecessarily broken. Not game breaking but irritating (and a lot more irritating than mediocre and un-skippable cinematics)

The game-play in Super Meat Boy deserves a solid 8. But I'm going to give it a 4 anyway. Why? Because the PC port feels horribly unpolished. An XBox 360 controller is (understandably) the recommended method of controlling Meat Buy. But does a it work out the box? No. The buttons mapping is completely mangled with no way of reconfiguring in-game. So fixing up the input config file I eventually got the stage controls to work but the menus are still buggered. Whatever, I can deal with that; except that there are parts of the menu that are unreachable with a mangle button setup. Oops. Fortunately having done a bit of game-dev specifically controller input I got the feeling that it was a Human Interface Device gone wrong. Fine, found it and removed it from the Device manager and everything worked. I should be happy. No, I've spent my time fixing issues the developers should have dealt with. Added to the controller woes: SMB does not start on some machines (screen remains black) and the graphics are messed up on others (mostly black textures) making it unplayable. A good concept? Yes. A good implementation? No.

This is not an awful game and I suspect lurking in it somewhere is a good game waiting for a little more developer attention. However I cannot bring myself to like it because everything is just *off*. If you dig through these reviews there are already plenty of people (legitimately) complaining about the story, the combat, the general blandness so I won't rehash those points. What really irritates me is that the game won't leave my desktop alone. Every time I exit Afterfall I have to resize all my windows and move my icons back because the game won't allow to play it in my monitors native resolution. Guys it's 2013; this should not be a problem anymore. And for this I give it a 3 instead of a 5

This game is not fundamentally broken (with the possible exception of the AI) but it doesn't feel like it's a finished product either. It doesn't capture the feel of the Aliens movie, it looks dated and it's short and not very interesting. In no way does it live up to the marketing and hype around it.

I had given this game an 8. But it's just too unstable (even after a slew of updates). Couple crashing with save points that are a bit far between and too many stages that are just kill X number of enemies before continuing and you have game that becomes tedious. Other gripes include: whilst the stages are not big they are still too big. I think this game might have benefited from being smaller and more focused. And the sound effects really sound (ha!) like they were an afterthought. Combat also is tricky as there is a lot of clutter; I regularly get hooked on projections and wedge in debris while 6doffing my way around enemies. Is this game bad though? No. It's pretty and has an appealing and quirky sense of humour. It tries hard to be Descent and does capture some of what made Descent great. Am I upset I paid money for it? No, definitely not but I do wish it was a little more polished.

This must be one of the dullest, most boring and most repetitive games I've played in a long time. Even so I'll very seldom give a score under 5 unless it's technically broken in some way. And Hell and Damnation is: occasionally the magic pentagram save point jobbies don't appear leaving me having to slog through the same boring stage again. Beyond some pretty screenshots this game leaves little to recommend. Even the boss fights are bland.

Ubisoft's wicked DRM strikes again. I can't be arsed to rant about it. But I'm sure if you dig through the zeros you'll find something similar. To people giving 10s to offset zeros, if the game is broken to the point of unplayability that's a zero; don't try and drag the score back up again.

The premise is interesting and the combat is generally fun (not to mention it's one of the few games where I've read the dialog). It's slightly let down by it's own size - there's a lot of grinding to get the more powerful ship hulls and weapons. Also the second half of the game could (I think) have been more strategic - or have been dropped entirely. Nevertheless the difficulty is fair: attacking something many levels above one is going to end badly and attacking something levels below won't net you anything worthwhile and as one always knows the level of the system one's entering... All-in-all a solid effort that could have had just a little more polish.

I want to like this game, I really, really do. But it's so frustrating that I'm not willing to take any more time to play it. Yes, it's a rogue like- and yes, rogue likes- are heavily dependent on randomness but FTL takes it to the extreme. I lost and lost and lost (and losing sees a restart from scratch - only the hardcore need apply); it's not even that there isn't a component of skill. One does need to be skilled: managing your crew, sub-systems and power takes a lot of effort whilst also pinpointing attacks on the enemy. But chance and the increasing difficulty curve as you venture further across the universe outweigh the skill component solidly. Rather save money, get a dice, roll it till a six; then declare yourself a winner. It'll be far less aggravating all 'round.

The story and setting are alright and when I first reviewed it here (said review since disappeared) I gave it an 8. With time I've realised how dull and repetitive this game is (and also how much it depends on fetch quests) so I'm dropping it to a 4.

COD 4: MW I really enjoyed. MW2 was alright but given that I basically can't remember it can't have been that great. With that said I did get a strange sense of deja-vu playing MW3... If Activision can't be bothered to come up with reasonable plot I can't be bothered to finish writing this... Utterly whatever.

Mirrors Edge probably seemed like a good idea at the time (the concept sounds good to me) but somewhere between thought and execution the game lost it's way - plummeting again, again to the hard streets below. Not to put too fine a point on it, this game is tedious - and very reminiscent of the old 8-bitters where the only way to progress was to learn from death after death. Watching your hands drift past what should have been an easy grab or battling to climb onto a low box when fences are easily hopped doesn't help. I'm sort of wondering if it was as an apology that the game sometimes moves you forward a check-point when you die. My cynical soul, though, assumes it's just a bug.